Mobile terminals may be utilized in a wide variety of environmental contexts. For example, mobile terminals may be utilized either indoors or outdoors, at the home or office, etc. In this regard, the environmental context of a mobile terminal is distinguished from the activity context of the user of the mobile terminal with the environmental context defining the environment or surroundings within which the mobile terminal operates, while the activity context is intended to identify an activity, such as running, walking, bicycling, etc. in which the user of the mobile terminal is currently engaged.
Contextual information, such as information regarding the environmental context of the mobile terminal, may be useful in order to tailor the performance of the mobile terminal to the current context. In this regard, the performance of many applications that are executed by the mobile terminal may be tailored based upon the environmental context of the mobile terminal. In this regard, a contacts or phone book application may present different responses to the user or may differently prioritize the responses based upon the environmental context of the mobile terminal. As another example, a media recommendation application may provide different recommendations to the user based upon the environmental context of the mobile terminal.
Various techniques have been developed in an effort to determine the environmental context of a mobile terminal. However, it would be desirable to provide improved techniques for determining the environmental context of a mobile terminal such that the performance of the mobile terminal including, for example, the performance of various applications executed by the mobile terminal may be even more precisely tailored based upon the environmental context of the mobile terminal.